six days at the bottom of the ocean
by sea-salt kisses
Summary: They don't say anything because they don't need to; they both know it's prolonging the inevitable. — Axel, Roxas. AU.


**six days at the bottom of the ocean**  
They don't say anything because they don't need to; they both know it's prolonging the inevitable.

...

When Roxas is diagnosed, Axel quits his job in the city. He takes every penny from his savings account and makes a payment on a shack that sits on a strip of abandoned rocky beach. He packs their bags and carries Roxas down to the car, leaves a note for his sister-in-law on the coffee table.

The page is empty, smells of cologne and sweat, and holds an apology and a made-up phone number.

Roxas leans on the window the entire ride, watching the transition from shimmering city pollution to trees to fog and fields and an ocean carved of onyx and porcelain foam. Axel drums his fingers on the wheel, croons Fleetwood Mac and Simon and Garfunkel. They don't say anything because they don't need to. They both know it's prolonging the inevitable.

Because if Axel thinks on the prognosis too long, his vision begins to blur, and an ache crescendoes into a lump that clogs his throat until his breathing heaves around it.

Roxas comments off-handedly that they're driving too far on the shoulder, so Axel bites his inner lip until his mouth permeates with the tartness of metal, cool and sterile like a hospital room. He smiles to fill the emptiness, smiles to fill himself, swallows his bile and drives on.

It's fifteen straight hours to their new residence. They arrive in the middle of the night, and Axel unloads their things and carries Roxas inside, deposits the bundle of soft flesh and little bones on a bed without sheets. The heat in the room is stifling, the sort that hangs thick in the air like apprehension. Roxas curls in upon himself and Axel flicks at a june bug carcass left clinging to the headboard. It's quiet as he tosses a flannel over their bodies, clambering up into bed.

When Roxas kisses him goodnight, it tastes of tension and something stale, like dusty corners in an empty room. Axel tries not to overanalyze and sleeps with the shape of a spine beneath his chin, curved and sharp like a brittle star.

...

The first week is a week they need, a week Roxas has been hoping for since they'd moved to the city. They gorge themselves in the morning on overripe oranges with decaying peels, the fruit succulent and dripping with cloying fragrance. It stains the palms of their hands, makes the skin stick together in the heat when Axel takes the hand next to his, twines his grip into smaller joints and smiles and leads Roxas into the sun.

It's cleaner here, the air free of the smog that taints urban air. Roxas feels it in every laugh, spreading deeper. He can forget the clang of cabs and the weight of impurity in his lungs. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend he has forever, forever and a sky and a ringing in his ears from the tumultuous crashing of waves omnipresent. He hears it when he sleeps, hears it in his dreams, and it drowns out the words Axel tries to say, the words that lose their edge in the silence.

They go out in a boat with a local, toss lures into the sea to fish for the bonefish that near the shallows. It's quiet and pleasant until Axel feels the weight of a body slumping against him, the sound of something splashing into the water. The fisherman rescues his rod and Axel shakes Roxas hard and fast and violent, desperate, in panic and mania and fear until the boy screams for him to_ stop_, _**stop**_.

Axel doesn't make any move to stop Roxas when the boy hurls bowls full of seashells from the confines of their bedroom, their pieces painting the floor. The boy's hands bruise a subtle purple that whispers of fragility and a ticking clock, and his lungs heave around what's inevitable.

When Roxas slips back into the bedroom and slams the door, Axel takes his leave - leans on the railing and lets the ants crawl over his peeling legs. The remains of breakfast left out on the railing mold in the heat, and Axel pretends it's dark enough for him not to watch the pieces of meat that swim atop a writhing black sea of little bodies. He fights the nausea like he's been doing for weeks.

And he doesn't listen to Roxas in the next room because if he does, he knows that the strength shelved deep within him will begin to break.

…

Axel and Roxas don't leave the bungalow after that, except for Axel to rush to the local delicatessen and rush back, given Roxas's delicate condition. The weeks waltz slower, and slower, Roxas curling up much earlier and much more frequently to sleep. Axel picks up smoking again, a pack a day of menthols to rot his lungs. He tells himself it's a form of therapy, a way for his body to acclimate to the changes happening much faster inside of Roxas. The sickness is slow and methodic, a well practiced assassin that lives inside Roxas at all times. He wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, clutches tight to Axel and speaks in a half-dazed delirium of the numbness in his legs, the weight that presses his chest like a lead pipe.

Six months after they arrive, Axel has to carry Roxas's wasting body from the bedroom into the kitchen, shove eggs and pancakes down his throat. They erupt against the basin of the toilet an hour later, the first attempt Roxas has made to eat in days. Axel leans on the rotting banister as Roxas wretches helplessly, biting his inner lip and biting and biting and biting-

Three weeks later, Axel carries Roxas down to the seaside. Blotching purple bruises permeate the skin beneath his eyes, the flesh stretched pale and thin over the arch of a small cheekbone.

"Not much longer," he says.

Axel curls protectively over the body in his arms, as if he can shield Roxas from what's hurting him. The blond smiles softly and leans back, whispering sweet nothings that sound like ghost wind in his ears. All at once, Axel wants to throw the boy down and rip his stomach apart, claw through the hideous thing that grows inside of his beautiful boy and rip and tear it away – he wants to burn it, wants to stitch Roxas back up so that he can be whole again, so that he can smile and sing and laugh and make soft, sweet little sounds at the feeling of Axel above him and inside him, so that his fingernails were sharp enough to leave crescent shaped bruises like they used to. So that his gums wouldn't bleed and his teeth wouldn't ache, so his scalp wouldn't bruise under the slightest of touches. So that Roxas didn't weigh 95 lbs when soaking wet, so that it wouldn't hurt to kiss him, so that his fingers wouldn't freeze, knit tightly between Axel's own.

They hold each other as Axel rocks them, and the sand chafes their thighs and runs down Axel's trainers. They hold each other and trace the lines of the opposite's face, the curve of trembling lips and the moist slip of filming sweat.

They hold each other because there isn't much point in lying, any more. Roxas smiles and Axel buries his face against the pale column of a throat, the white noise of the sea a fracturing lullaby.

…

Axel will return to the same beach years later and spread his long limbs across the sand, breathe in a long forgotten scent of salt and sweat and tart blue ice cream. Roxas's bruises will be etched along the clouds, a dull, fading purple. The colour of his eyes will radiate forth from the bottom of the ocean, scooped up and battered against the shoreline. And there will be sighs and shivers and a remembrance of a smile, of the hesitant timbre of a laugh and the soft heat of fingers inside his own.

There will be fragments of a life lived and hopes for another chance.

There will be no recollection of a boy with eyes dark as the seafloor, or of the man who would follow him years and years later, warm in an empty bed.


End file.
